@ Sea - Full Speed Ahead
October 2011 · Hotel @nyware
The CallTrust First. Understand Later.
On a cruise ship, optimism becomes a kind of operating system: everything feels more vivid, more possible, and more memorable. The strange part is that the meaning usually arrives after the movement.
On a cruise ship, you have this malignant optimism. Optimism is the opium of the passenger.
There is no doubt about it: travel can trigger an exhilarating state of mind where everything suddenly feels fresh, vivid, intensely interesting, and memorable. Things have a way of seeming emphasized and underlined.
That is the speed of trust: trusting in advance what can only make sense in reverse.
Archive · October 2011
San Pedro · Hotel California
The early operating theory: travel required less money than imagination, less certainty than movement, and far more resourcefulness than planning.
Normally, you need three things to travel: Time, Money and Opportunity. It is the way of the cynic who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.
Welcome to the Hotel @nyware, located on Blogger, at the corner of Facebook and Twitter, right across from YouTube and Picasa.
You can check out anytime you like, but you can never leave.Hotel @nyware · 2011
San Pedro-Hotel California
Open the original October 2011 field note.
Read the archiveIdentity · Resourcefulness
The Bobby Fischer of Resourcefulness
A self-portrait written before the doctrine had a name: improvisation, low-cost movement, and predictable unpredictability.
It has never been about resources. I am the Bobby Fischer of resourcefulness, the Cosmo Kramer of planning, the Curious George of predictable unpredictability. Note to self: rock on, man with the yellow hat, rock on.
No matter how low the budget bar gets, I always manage to limbo my way under it. If you think about it, I am the Wilt Chamberlain of shoestring travel. I am putting up numbers so unthinkable that normals will never, ever reach them: 300 ports in 365 days.
Why be a man when you can be a success?
Voice · Before the Doctrine
The Story Was Already Telling on Me
The jokes were not decoration. They were early telemetry: movement, reinvention, and identity were already becoming the recurring system.
As the Morgan Freeman of travel writers, if you will: everyone recognizes me but I never gain any due recognition. Hotel @nyware has not exactly been the Edgar Allan Poe of knock-outs, the Emily Dickinson of ground and pound, or the Robert Frost of ass-kicking.
It is just me, born with a Ph.D. in throwing junk up against the wall and seeing what will stick. Looking back, it has been the Colonel Kurtz of experiences. I have gone native and insane so many times, but in a Lance Armstrong–Barbara Bush sort of way.
Sometimes I am the census taker. Sometimes the cannibal psychiatrist.
Leave the fixed point before the logic is complete.
Use what is available instead of waiting for ideal conditions.
Trust first. Understand later. Keep the evidence.
Hotel @nyware · Original Network
A Home of Record Made of Links
The early version of location-neutral life was less a destination than a network of publishing, people, and motion.
Hotel @nyware lived on Blogger, at the corner of Facebook and Twitter, with the rest of the early social web just across the street.